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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (162942)	5/23/2005 6:41:46 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

It is appropriate, I guess, if you're doing culture warrior history of the 60s, you'd want to do culture warrior version of the 50s and the 70s too. Meanwhile, back in the 50s, Russia and China had a falling out on the conventional reality front. Cambodia is a 70s thing: During the Second Indochina War, the Nixon administration of the United States began to bomb the border of South Vietnam and Cambodia, targeting secret Vietcong camps and supply routes. The Vietcong sought refuge in nearby villages, and the United States began to bomb these villages as well. The neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk could do nothing, and when Sihanouk began to send supplies to North Vietnam, a civil war began. In 1970, while Prince Sihanouk was away in Beijing, General Lon Nol seized power in a military coup d'état and declared the Khmer Republic. Immediately a civil war began between this military regime and the xenophobic and communist Khmer Rouge, which had gathered much strength because of support by the communist North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Led by Pol Pot, who later became the Prime Minister of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge captured the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 and renamed the country to Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge ideology included: * closing schools and hospitals; * abolishing banking and currency; * outlawing religion; * confiscating private property; and * relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where they were subject to forced labor. The Khmer Rouge justified its actions by claiming that Cambodia was on the brink of major famine due to the American bombing campaigns, and that this required the evacuation of the cities to the countryside so that people could become self-sufficient. It had the effect of converting the entire country into a re-education/labor camp. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, about 1.7 million people were killed, or one-fifth of the country's population of the time. The Killing Fields and the S-21 prison at Tuol Sleng shocked the entire world as the government committed brutal autogenocide. In addition to death from work starvation and exhaustion, the regime killed anyone suspected with connections with either the defeated Khmer Republic government or the previous Sihanouk government, as well as intellectuals (Pol Pot defined anyone who wore glasses as automatically an intellectual), professionals, and also ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Chams, Laotians, and Thai. If this wasn't enough, Cambodia broke into Vietnamese, Lao, and Thai territory and massacred entire villagers of border provinces. Even the royal family was brutalized. Prince Sihanouk was put under house arrest and many of the Sisowath branch of the family were massacred. The Tuol Sleng museum is a good authority on this period. In 1978, a newly-unified Vietnam invaded Cambodia after repeated Khmer Rouge raids into Vietnamese territory and drove the Khmer Rouge to the western border with Thailand. A civil war between the Vietnamese-sponsored government of Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge continued until United Nations sponsored elections in 1993 restored stability. Prince Sihanouk became King again, and a coalition government between the conservative-royalist Funcinpec party and the pro-Vietnamese Cambodian People's Party was formed in 1998. That year also saw the surrender of the remaining Khmer Rouge troops and the death of Pol Pot. Nonetheless, none of the Khmer Rouge leaders have been tried for their war crimes. Cambodia now attempts to rebuild itself after years of horror. en.wikipedia.org As far as the American Left, you'll have to fight it out with Nadine for official local spokesperson role there, or maybe she'll cede you "the American Left" if you let her keep "the Left" overall. So many straw men, so little time.